Permission To Enter

1. THESE RED PIGTAILS

There had been an event. To speak of it required the pluperfect. Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell, the protagonists in this event, were four-year-old children. The outdoor pool—really a shallow trough in the park, one foot at its deepest end—had been full of kids, “splashing all ways, causing madness.” There was no lifeguard at the time of the event, and parents were left to keep an eye as best they could. “They had a guard up the hill, in Hampstead, for them. Nothing for us.” This was an interesting detail. Keisha—now ten years old and curious about the tensions between grown people—tried to get at its meaning. “Stop gazing. Lift your foot,” her mother said. They sat on a bench in a shoe shop on the Kilburn High Road getting measured for a pair of dull brown shoes with a T-strap that did not express any of the joy that must surely exist in the world, despite everything. “I’ve got Cheryl acting wild in one corner, I got Jayden in my arms bawling, and I’m trying to see where you are, trying to keep it all together. . . . ” It was in this ellipsis that the event had occurred: a child nearly drowned. Yet the significance of the event lay elsewhere. “You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You was the only one saw she was in trouble.” After the event, the mother of the child, Pauline Hanwell, an Irishwoman, thanked Marcia Blake many times, and this in itself was a kind of event. “I knew Pauline to look at but not to speak to. She was a bit snooty with me back then.” Keisha could neither contradict nor verify this account—she had no memory of it. However, the foreshadowing could be considered suspicious. Her own celebrated will and foresight so firmly established, and her sister Cheryl already wild and unreliable. “Keep still now,” Marcia murmured, pushing the steel bar down to meet her daughter’s toes.

2. KIWIFRUIT

In the lethal quiet of the Hanwell flat, a highlight was snack time. It was taken seriously by Mrs. Hanwell, who kept a trolley for the purpose. Three-tiered, with swivelling wheels of brass. “There’s no point bringing it all out for two, but when there’s three I like to get it out.” Keisha Blake sat cross-legged in front of the television with her good friend Leah Hanwell, with whom she had bonded over a dramatic event. She turned to monitor the trolley’s progress: food delighted Keisha Blake, and she looked forward to it above all things. Blocking the girls’ view, Mrs. Hanwell now asked the television a question: “Who are all these dangerous-looking fellas in a van?” Leah turned up the volume. She pointed to the TV, at Hannibal’s gleaming white hair, and then at her mother, in reality. “That hair makes you look well old,” she said. Keisha tried to imagine saying something of this kind to her own mother. Silently, she mourned the loss of the biscuit plate and whatever novelty was contained in those furry brown eggs. She put her feet together, ready to stand up and go home. But Mrs. Hanwell did not start yelling or hitting. She only touched her bowl of hair and sighed. “It went this color when I had you.”

3. HOLES

The stick jammed the doors of the lift—this had been the whole point of the exercise. An alarm sounded. All three children went screaming and laughing down the stairs, up the incline, and over the boundary of the Caldwell Estate wall to sit on the pavement on the other side. Nathan Bogle pulled his knees right up to his chin and put his arms around them. “How many holes you got?” he asked. Both girls were silent. “What?” said Leah, finally. “Down there”—he jabbed a finger at Keisha’s crotch to demonstrate. “How many? You don’t even know.” Keisha dared to lift her eyes from the road to her friend. Leah was hopelessly red in the face. “Everybody knows that,” Keisha countered, trying to muster the further boldness she sensed was required. “You should fuck off and find out.” “You don’t even know,” Nathan concluded, and Leah stood up suddenly and kicked his ankle and shouted, “But she does, though!,” and took Keisha’s hand and ran back to the flat, holding hands all the way because they were best friends, bonded for life by a dramatic event, and everyone in Caldwell best know about it.

4. UNCERTAINTY

They found Cheryl watching television, plaiting her own hair, from the back of her head forward. Keisha Blake challenged her elder sister to say how many holes there were. It was not good to have Cheryl laugh at you. It was a loud, relentless laugh, fuelled by the other person’s mortification.

5. PHILOSOPHICAL DISAGREEMENT

Keisha Blake was eager to replicate some of the conditions she had seen at the Hanwells’. Cup, tea bag, then water, then—only then—milk. On a tea tray. Her mother was of the opinion that anyone who is in another person’s flat as often as Leah Hanwell was in the Blakes’ forgoes the right to be a guest and should simply be treated as a member of the family, with all the dispensations and latitude that suggests. Cheryl took a third position: “She’s always hanging round here. Don’t she like her own place? What’s she up in my makeup all the time for? Who does she think she is?”

“Mum, you got a tea tray?”

“Just take it in to her. Lord!”

6. SOME ANSWERS

Keisha Blake

Purple

Cameo, Culture Club, Bob Marley

Rather have the money

Michael Jackson

Nobody. If I had to, Rahim.

Don’t know

Doctor or Missionary

Leah Hanwell

World peace in South Africa

Deaf

“Hurricane”

“E.T.”

Leah Hanwell

Yellow

Madonna, Culture Club, Thompson Twins

Be really famous

Harrison Ford

Top secret: Nathan Bogle

Daisies or buttercups

Manager

Keisha Blake

No bombs

Deaf

“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”

“E.T.”

7. FILET-O-FISH, LARGE FRIES, APPLE PIE

It was a Caldwell assumption that plumbers did very well for themselves. Keisha saw little evidence of this. Either the personal wealth of plumbers was a myth or her father was incompetent. She had in the past prayed for work for Augustus Blake, without results. Now it was almost midday on a Saturday and no news had arrived of leaking pipes or backed-up toilets. During periods of stress Augustus Blake stood on the balcony and smoked Lambert & Butlers, and this he did now. Keisha could not tell if Leah felt the anxiety of the phone not ringing in the flat as the rest of them did. The two girls lay on their bellies in front of the television set. They watched four hours of morning shows and cartoons. Each one they ridiculed in turn and spoiled for Jayden, but there was no other way of explaining to each other why they should want to watch the same things as a six-year-old boy. When the lunchtime news began, Gus came in and asked where Cheryl was.

“Out.”

“More fool her.”

Squeals, and a small hand-holding dance. Apart from Marcia scoring a point off the situation—“See how quick you all get yourselves ready when you’re going somewhere you want to go?”—the joy was unconfined, and everything colluded in extending it; Marcia did not make them talk to every church lady on the high road, and Gus called Keisha Madam One and Leah Madam Two and did not get angry when Jayden ran ahead toward the twin arcs of the golden M.

8. THROWN

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as “intelligence.” Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary—in search of something like “completion”—and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things—could not resist wanting to read things—and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn’t it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will? She could sit in one place longer than other children, be bored for hours without complaint, and was completely devoted to filling in every last corner of the coloring books Augustus Blake sometimes brought home. She could not help her mutated will—no more than she could help the shape of her feet or the street on which she was born. She was unable to glean real satisfaction from accidents. In the child’s mind, a breach now appeared: between what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it. She began to exist for other people, and if ever asked a question to which she did not know the answer she was wont to fold her arms across her body and look upward. As if the question itself were too obvious to truly concern her.

9. PUSH IT

It had never occurred to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was in possession of a particular type of personality. As with most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake was willing and available to do. Together they ran, jumped, danced, sang, bathed, colored-in, rode bikes, pushed a Valentine under Nathan Bogle’s door, read magazines, shared chips, sneaked a cigarette, read Cheryl’s diary, wrote the word “FUCK” on the first page of a Bible, tried to get “The Exorcist” out of the video shop, watched a prostitute or a loose woman or a girl just crazy in love suck someone off in a phone box, found Cheryl’s weed, found Cheryl’s vodka, shaved Leah’s forearm with Cheryl’s razor, did the moonwalk, learned the obscene dance popularized by Salt-N-Pepa, and many other things of this nature. But now they were leaving Quinton Primary for Brayton Comprehensive, where everybody seemed to have a personality, and so Keisha looked at Leah and tried to ascertain the outline of hers.

10. PORTRAIT

A generous person, wide open to the entire world—with the possible exception of her own mother. Ceased eating tuna because of the dolphins, and then all meat because of animals generally. If there happened to be a homeless man sitting on the ground outside the supermarket in Cricklewood, Keisha Blake had to wait until Leah Hanwell had finished bending down and speaking with the homeless man—not simply asking him if there was anything he wanted but making conversation. If she was more curt with her own family than with a homeless man, this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically, where it was most needed. Within Brayton, Leah Hanwell befriended everyone without distinction or boundary, but the hopeless cases did not alienate her from the popular, and vice versa, and how this was managed Keisha Blake had no understanding. A little of this universal good feeling spread to Keisha by association, though no one ever mistook Keisha’s cerebral willfulness for her friend’s generosity of spirit.

11. THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

The red-and-white air technology of the Greek goddess of victory. Keisha Blake put her hand against the reinforced shop-front glass. Separated from happiness. It had been everywhere, the air, free for the taking, but she had come to desire it only now that she saw it thus defined, extracted, rendered visible. The infinitely available thing, now enclosed in the sole of a shoe! You had to admire the audacity. Ninety-nine quid. Maybe at Christmas.

12. EVIAN

The exact same thing had been achieved with water. When Marcia Blake spotted the bottle hiding under a bag of carrots she cussed Keisha Blake, snatched it out of the trolley, and placed it back on the wrong shelf next to the jams.

13. THE NEW TIMETABLE

“There: he’s in your French class. And your drama class.”

“Who is?”

“Nathan!”

“Bogle? So?”

“!”

“Oh, my gosh, Keisha. We were babies. You’re so dumb sometimes.”

14. GCSE

In the office of Keisha Blake’s head of year, baseball caps and inappropriate jewelry were confiscated and hung from the wall on hooks. Keisha Blake had not been called in for a reprimand; she had come to discuss her options for a set of exams still three years in the future. She did not really want to discuss these exams; she simply wanted it to be noted that she was the kind of person who thought three years ahead about the important things in life. As she got up to leave, she spotted a silver chain from which drooped a tiny pistol picked out in diamanté crystals. “That’s my sister’s,” she said. “Oh, is it?” the teacher said, and looked out the window. Keisha persisted: “She doesn’t go here anymore. She got expelled.” The teacher frowned. He took the necklace from the wall and passed it to Keisha. He said, “It’s hard to believe that you and Cheryl Blake are even related.”

15. SONY WALKMAN (BORROWED)

That Keisha should be able to hear the Rebel MC in her ears and at the same time walk down Willesden Lane was a kind of miracle and modern ecstasy, and yet there was very little space in the day for anything like ecstasy or abandon or even simple laziness, for whatever you did in life you had to do it twice as well as they did it “just to break even,” a troubling belief held simultaneously by Keisha Blake’s mother and her Uncle Jeffrey, who was known to be “gifted” but also “beyond the pale.”

16. JANE EYRE

When being bullied, Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of a superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the other end of life, when qualities of the kind that Keisha Blake possessed—cleverness, will to power—became “their own reward,” and that this remained true even if the people in the literature and the movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socioeconomic and historical universe, and—had they ever met you—would very likely have enslaved you or at best bullied you to precisely the same extent as Lorna Mackenzie, who had a problem with the way you acted like you were better than everyone else.

17. CITATION

Further confirmation of this principle was to be found in the Bible itself.

18. THE NUMBER 37

On Sundays, Keisha Blake attended Kilburn Pentecostal with her family, minus Cheryl, and Leah often came along, not because she was in any sense a believer but, rather, motivated by the generosity of spirit described above. Now that the girls were fourteen, a new policy revealed itself. When they reached the corner by the McDonald’s, Leah Hanwell said to Keisha Blake, “Actually, I think I might get on the 37, go to the Lock, see that lot.” “Fair enough,” Keisha Blake said. There had been an attempt over the summer to mix that Camden Lock lot with this Caldwell lot, but Keisha Blake did not especially care for Baudelaire or Bukowski or Nick Drake or Sonic Youth or Joy Division or boys who looked like girls or vice versa or Anne Rice or William Burroughs or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” or CND or Glastonbury or the Situationists or “Breathless” or Samuel Beckett or Andy Warhol or a million other Camden things, and when Keisha brought a wondrous Monie Love seven-inch over to play on Leah’s hi-fi there was something awful in the way Leah blushed and conceded that it was probably O.K. to dance to. They had only Prince left, and he was wearing thin.

19. VIVRE SA VIE

This sudden and violent divergence in their tastes was shocking to Keisha, and she persisted in believing that Leah’s new tastes were an affectation, unrelated to anything essential in her being and largely taken up to annoy her oldest friend. “Bell me later,” Leah Hanwell said, and jumped on the bus’s open rear end. Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d’heure, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.

20. RABBIT

On the eve of Keisha Blake’s sixteenth birthday, a gift was left for her, in the corridor outside the flat. The wrapping had a repeating butterfly pattern. The card, unsigned, read UNWRAP IN PRIVATE, but the slant of the “p” and the pointy “w” told Keisha that it was the hand of her good friend Leah Hanwell. She retreated to the bathroom. A vibrator, neon pink with revolving beads in its gigantic tip. Keisha sat on the closed lid of the toilet and made some strategic calculations. Wrapping the dildo in a towel, she hid it in the room she shared with Cheryl, then took the box and the wrapping paper down to the courtyard to the public bins by the parking bays. The following Saturday morning she began approximating the early signs of a cold, and on Sunday claimed a severe cough and stomach ache. Her mother pressed her tongue down with a fork and said it was a shame, Pastor Akinwande was going to talk on the topic of Abraham and Isaac. From the balcony, Keisha Blake watched her family walk to church, not without regret: she was sincerely interested in the topic of Abraham and Isaac.

21. RABBIT, RUN

But she had also privately decided that she was a different kind of believer from her mother, and could survive the occasional anthropological adventure into sin. She returned inside and raided an alarm clock and a calculator for their batteries. She did not employ any mood lighting or soft music or scented candles. She did not take off her clothes. Three minutes later, she’d established several things previously unknown to her: what a vaginal orgasm was; the difference between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm; and the existence of a viscous material, produced by her body, that she had, afterward, to rinse out of the ridges along the vibrator’s shaft, in the little sink in the corner of the room. She had the dildo for only a couple of weeks but in that time used it regularly, sometimes as much as several times a day, often without washing in between, and always in this businesslike way, as if delegating a task to somebody else.

22. PERMISSION TO ENTER

Though they were five, the Blakes occupied a three-bed, one-bathroom unit, in which only the youngest child, Jayden, had a room of his own. As far as Keisha could make out, privacy did not seem to be of any importance to her brother—he was eleven, and still prone to streaks of domestic nudity—but for her own person it was a necessity, more so with every passing day, and the arrival of the dildo prompted her to reopen an old debate with her mother.

“People who want locks just want a basic human right, which is privacy, look it up,” Keisha said, although with less heat this time, alarmed that her mother, in the general reach of a maternal cliché, should have gathered in the truth so precisely. She retreated to her room and thought about Jesus, another deeply godly person who was not understood as godly by the sort of clichéd people who called themselves godly, though, to be fair, those people were probably also sometimes godly in their own uneducated way, but only by accident, and only a bit.

23. FOR THE PROSECUTION

Marcia found Leah’s gift during one of her routine sweeps. These sweeps really had Cheryl as their object—she had begun disappearing on Fridays and returning Monday—and nothing would have been easier for Keisha than to add dildo possession to her older sister’s already ruined reputation. Unable to look any longer at Marcia brandishing the plastic bag, Keisha Blake threw herself face down on the bed to commence fake crying but, in the middle of this procedure, found herself locked in a genuine struggle, unable to countenance blaming either her sister or Leah, but equally unable to imagine the second option—her father being informed—with which she was now being presented. Keisha Blake thought to the left and thought to the right, but there was no exit, and this was very likely the first time she became aware of the problem of suicide.

“And don’t tell me you bought it,” her mother said, “because I don’t know where you think you would have got the money.” In the course of this interrogation, Marcia went through most of the girls on the estate before working herself round to the painful possibility of Leah and finding the confirmation in her daughter’s face.

24. RUPTURE

There followed a break between Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake, enforced by Marcia, followed by a cooling off that could not be blamed on Marcia alone. The girls were sixteen. This period lasted a year and a half.

25. ANGST!

In the absence of Leah—at school, on the streets, in Caldwell—Keisha Blake felt herself to be revealed and exposed. She had not noticed until the break that the state of “being Leah Hanwell’s friend” constituted a sort of passport, lending Keisha a protected form of access in most situations. She was now relegated to the conceptual realm of “those church kids,” most of whom were Nigerian or otherwise African, and did not share Keisha Blake’s anthropological curiosity regarding sin or her love of rap music. To the children of her own background, she believed, rightly or wrongly, that she was an anomaly, and to the ravers and the indie kids she knew for certain that she was the wrong kind of outcast. It did not strike Keisha Blake that such feelings of alienation are the banal fate of adolescents everywhere. She considered herself peculiarly afflicted, and it is not an exaggeration to say that she struggled to think of anyone, besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus, who had experienced the profound isolation and loneliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.

26. YOUR ENEMY’S ENEMY

In Keisha Blake’s break with Leah Hanwell we must admit that Marcia Blake spied an opportunity. The break coincided with the problem of sex, which, anyway, could no longer be ignored. A simple ban would have backfired—they had been through all that already with Cheryl, who was presently twenty years old and six months pregnant. Pushing Keisha Blake toward Rodney Banks was Mrs. Blake’s elegant solution: at exactly the moment that her daughter was about to detonate, she was defused. Rodney lived with his parents in a flat on the same corridor, attended the same school. He was one of the few Caribbean children in the church. His mother, Christine, was a close friend. “You should give Rodney some time,” Marcia said, passing Keisha Blake a plate to dry. “He’s like you, always reading.” For precisely this reason, Keisha had always been wary of Rodney and keen to avoid him—as much as that was possible in a place like Caldwell—on the principle that the last thing a drowning person needs is another drowning person clinging to her.

27. ON THE OTHER HAND

Beggars cannot be choosers.

28. READING WITH RODNEY

Keisha Blake sat on Rodney Banks’s bed, feet tucked underneath her. She was already five feet eight, while Rodney had stopped growing the previous summer. To be Christian to Rodney Banks, Keisha Blake tried to sit whenever possible. Rodney had in his hand an abridged library copy of an infamous book by Albert Camus. Both Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks sounded the “t” and the “s” in this name, not knowing any better: such are the perils of autodidacticism. Rodney Banks was reading the text aloud, with his own skeptical running commentary. He called this “putting faith to the test.” Pastor liked to recommend this muscular approach to his teen-age flock, although when he did so it is unlikely that he had Camus in mind. Rodney Banks looked somewhat like Martin Luther King, Jr.: the same rounded, gentle face. When he made a point that interested him, he scribbled a little illegal note on the page, which Keisha read and tried to admire. She found it hard to concentrate on the book, because she was concerned about when and how the heavy petting would begin. It had happened last Friday and the Friday before, but she had not known it was going to happen until the very last moment, as they were both somehow unable to refer to it verbally, or build up to it in a natural manner. Instead, she had launched herself at Rodney both times and hoped for a response, which she had received, more or less. “We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking,” Rodney read, and then made a note by this sentence: “So what? (Fallacious argument.)”

29. RUMPOLE

The cooling-off period between Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell continued through their A-level exams, and this was partly a pragmatic decision on Keisha Blake’s part. Leah Hanwell was by this point taking the popular club amphetamine Ecstasy most weekends, and Keisha did not have the faith that she herself could be involved in that life and still pass the exams that she was beginning to comprehend would be essential. Which comprehension arrived partly through the efforts of a visiting careers officer. A young woman, from Barbados, new to the job, optimistic. Name unimportant. She was especially impressed by Rodney, taking him seriously and listening when he talked about the law. Where Rodney Banks had even got the idea of “the law” it was difficult to say. His mother was a school-dinner lady. His father drove a bus.

30. PARENTHETICAL

(Much later in life, while taking a long walk through North West London, it occurred to Keisha Blake that the young man she had turned into a comic anecdote to be told at dinner parties was in many ways himself a miracle of self-invention, a young man with a tremendous will, far outstripping her own.)

31. GOOD PLACE/NO PLACE

The Bajan told Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks that they needed to have a plan. All three were aware that Marcia Blake had her own plan: enrollment in a one-year business-administration course at Coles Academy, which was really just a corridor of office space above the old Woolworths on the Kilburn High Road. A racket, an unaccredited institution, taught by some Nairobi acquaintance of Pastor Akinwande, and requiring no move away from home.

32. CONTRA

The careers officer from Barbados chose five institutions for Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks—the same five; they had decided that they could not be parted—and showed them how to fill out the necessary forms. She wrote to Marcia on Keisha’s behalf. It won’t cost any money. She’ll get a full council grant. There’s a church. The train goes straight there, she’ll be safe, she won’t be the only one. Keisha Blake was advised to carry on this campaign of reassurance through the winter. Rodney was told to do the same with his mother. Keisha did not expect these campaigns to succeed. Marcia had been to the “countryside” and did not consider it a safe environment, preferring London, where at least you knew what you were up against. Then, in April, that “poor defenseless boy”—Marcia invariably called him that—was stabbed at an Eltham bus stop, overwhelmed by “a pack of animals.” Keisha Blake, Marcia Blake, Augustus Blake, Cheryl Blake, and Jayden Blake gathered around the television to watch the white boys walk free from court, swinging punches at the photographers. The boy’s body was taken to Jamaica, buried in Marcia’s parish.

33. BRIDESHEAD UNVISITED

The front door was on the latch. Rodney walked straight through into Keisha and Cheryl Blake’s bedroom and said, “Where is it?,” and Keisha said, “On the bed,” and Rodney said, “Let me see it,” and Keisha showed him the strange letter stamped with a coat of arms and said, “But if you’re not going, I’m not,” and Rodney said, “Just let me read it,” and Keisha said, “It’s only the interview offer. I’m not going to go,” and Rodney said, “Can I just read it, please!” And after he read it he did not mention it again, and neither did Keisha Blake. That night, they went to the Swiss Cottage Odeon to see a film about a man who dressed as a woman so that he could keep an eye on his children for reasons Keisha found herself too distracted even to begin to comprehend.

34. ECONOMICS

The interviews for Manchester were scheduled between 10 and 11 A.M. To reach Manchester from London’s Euston Station would require taking a train that left well before 9:30 A.M. These trains cost a hundred and three pounds return. A similar—even more expensive—problem ruled out Edinburgh.

35. PAUSE FOR AN ABSTRACT IDEA

In households all over the world, in many languages, this sentence usually emerges, eventually: “I don’t know you anymore.” It was always there, hiding in some private corner of the house, biding its time. Stacked with the cups, or squeezed between the DVDs or another terminal format. “I don’t know you anymore!”

36. A FURTHER PAUSE

In popular-science magazines, they give a biological explanation: the regeneration of cells. Many years after the events presently being recounted, at a dinner in our heroine’s own house, a philosopher sitting to her right—quoting another philosopher—suggested that she undertake a thought experiment: What if your brain cells were replaced individually with the brain cells of another person? At what point would you cease to be yourself? At what point would you become another person? His breath was nasty. He put his hand on her knee, and she didn’t remove it, not wanting to make a fuss in front of his wife. The wife of the philosopher was a gray-haired Q.C. In the philosopher’s brilliant mind, she was too old to conceivably still be his wife. And yet.

37. RESIDENTS’ MEETING

At a meeting of the Caldwell residents’ committee—at which Leah and Keisha, compelled by their parents, were the only young people in attendance—Keisha saw a seat free next to Leah but did not go toward it. Afterward, she tried to get away without being noticed, but Leah Hanwell called from across the room and Keisha turned and found the familiar open face smiling at her, unaffected by Keisha Blake’s attempts to imaginatively traduce it.

“Hey,” Leah Hanwell said. “All right,” Keisha Blake said.

They spoke of the boredom of the meeting, and of Cheryl’s baby, but the other subject could not be repressed for very long.

“What did you think of Manchester?”

“We’re not going there anymore,” Keisha Blake said. She put a deliberate emphasis on the plural pronoun. “It’s either Bristol or Hull.”

“I see Rodney in history. Never speaks a word.”

Keisha, hearing this comment as a personal insult, began robustly defending Rodney. Leah looked confused and fiddled with the three rings that hung from the upper lobe of her ear.

“No, I meant he’s got no questions—he knows it all already. Silent but deadly. You two will just fly through for sure. At least you can say C in GCSE maths. Mine’s a U. A lot of them won’t even consider your A levels if you failed your maths. I’m on a wing and a prayer at this point.”

Keisha tried to backpedal from her overreaction by suggesting that her old friend Leah Hanwell join her and her boyfriend for study sessions.

“I reckon I need to just get down to it and concentrate. It’ll be O.K. Would be good to see you, though, before the move. My mum’s loving it. I don’t care, I’ll be away at university by September, anyway—we pray. She’s acting like she’s given me some big present. A new life.”

38. MOBILITY

The Hanwells were moving into a maisonette. Practically in Maida Vale. Keisha had already heard all about it from Marcia—the shared garden, the three bedrooms. Something called a “study.”

39. RODNEY MAKES A NOTE

“Our pre-eminence: we live in the age of comparison.” (Nietzsche)

40. UNDERCOVER

Rodney Banks didn’t cause chaos in class, nor did he speak, and the combination made him invisible, anonymous. Keisha Blake asked him why he never spoke to the teachers. He said it was a strategy. He, like Keisha, was fond of strategies. This was one of the things they had in common, though it should be noted that the substance of their strategies was quite different. Keisha meant to charm her way through the front door. Rodney intended to slip through the back, unnoticed. Rodney Banks highlighted so many passages in Machiavelli’s “The Prince” that it became one block of yellow, and he didn’t dare return it to the library. “The difficult situation and the newness of my kingdom force me to do these things, and guard my borders everywhere.” He always seemed to have this book with him, along with the King James Bible, a combination in which he saw no contradiction.

41. PARITY

By July, Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake had both been offered university places. Both had lovers. (Leah’s lover played the bass in a band called No No Never.) Both the universities—Edinburgh and Bristol—and the lovers were of an equal standard, despite their many differences. Both girls had grown into decent-looking women with no serious physical or mental problems. Neither had any interest in tanning. It was Leah’s plan to spend a large part of this final NW summer under the shade of an oak tree on Hampstead Heath, with an assortment of friends, some food, a lot of alcohol, a little weed. She kept inviting Keisha, who longed to go. But Keisha was working part time in a bakery on the Kilburn High Road, and when she was not in the bakery she was in church, or helping Cheryl with the baby. At the bakery she was paid three-twenty-five an hour. She had to wear regulation flat black shoes with rounded toes and chunky soles, and a brown-and-white striped outfit topped off by a baker’s hat, with an elastic rim, under which every last strand of her hair was to be placed. It left an indentation along her forehead. She had to wash out the croissant molds and get to the doughnut sugar that got caught in the thin gulley between the presentation case and the glass. She had thought that she would prefer this to clothes retail, but in the end even her great enthusiasm for sausage rolls and iced fingers could not sustain her. She kept the university’s prospectus in her locker and often spent her lunch break slowly turning the glossy pages.

Every other Saturday she had a half day, and on a few occasions she managed to sneak to the Heath, alone. Rodney would not have enjoyed the scene there and could not reasonably be told about it, for this would lead to questions about the two sets of accounts that Keisha was now in the habit of keeping. On one side of the ledger she placed Rodney, Marcia, her siblings, the church, and Jesus Christ himself. On the other, Leah was lounging in the high grass, drinking cider and asking her good friend Keisha Blake if she would take the opportunity to kill P. W. Botha if he happened to be standing in front of her. “I’m not capable of murder,” protested Keisha Blake. “Everyone’s capable of everything,” insisted Leah Hanwell.

42. FURTHER EDUCATION

That autumn, Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks began attending a church in the Bristol suburbs, the Holy Spirit Ministry, which was identical in atmosphere to Kilburn Pentecostal—it came with a recommendation from Pastor. They did most of their socializing there, that first term, with an assortment of kindly people, all in their sixties and seventies. With people of their own age, they were less successful. Rodney left church literature under every door in Keisha’s corridor, and after that they were avoided by fellow-students and avoided them in turn. There seemed to be no point of entry. The students were tired of things Keisha had never heard of, and horrified by the only thing she knew well: the Bible. In the evenings, Rodney and Keisha sat at either end of a small desk in Keisha’s room and studied, as they had studied for their school exams, wearing earplugs and writing everything out by hand, first in draft copies, then in “best”—a habit picked up from Sunday school. There was a newly built computer center in the basement of Keisha’s building that might have made their lives easier: they went in the first week to check it out. A boy in a wide fedora with a leather thong hanging from its brim sat playing Doom, that dark corridor opening onto itself over and over.

43. FAMILY ROMANCE

The phone in the communal hallway rang. Rodney nodded. Keisha stood up. When the phone rang, it was usually for Rodney or Keisha—either Marcia or Christine—and they took these calls interchangeably. They were like siblings in every way, aside from the fact that they occasionally had sex with each other. The sex itself was cosy and familiar, without any hint of eroticism or orgasms, vaginal or clitoral. Rodney was a careful young man, preoccupied with condoms, terrified of pregnancy and disease. When he finally allowed Keisha Blake to have sex with him, it turned out to be a technical transition. She learned nothing new about Rodney’s body, or Rodney, only a lot of facts about condoms: their relative efficacy, the thickness of rubber, the right moment—the safest moment—to remove them afterward.

44. AMBITION

They were going to be lawyers, the first people in either of their families to become professionals. They thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.

45. LEAH’S VISIT

Springtime. Blossom overhead. Ms. Blake waited in the coach station of eagerness and hope, unable to remember why she had ever experienced any tension whatsoever with regard to her very dearest friend from home, Leah Hanwell. The coach arrived, the doors opened. Human figures with faces streamed into view, and Ms. Blake’s brain sought a match between a recent memory and a material reality. Her mistake was to cling to ideas that properly belonged to previous visits. Ideas like “red hair,” and “black jeans/ black boots/ black T-shirt.” Fashions change. University is a time of experimentation and metamorphosis. The person who gripped her by the shoulders could no longer be mistaken for a member of a riot-grrrl band or a minor Berlin artist. She was now some kind of dirty-blond warrior for the planet, with hair that was dreadlocking itself, and army trousers that would not pass an inspection.

46. PROPER NAMES

It was not that Ms. Blake hadn’t noticed the white people walking around with climbing equipment, or the white people huddled in stairwells discussing the best method of chaining themselves to an oak tree. She had experienced her usual anthropological curiosity with regard to these matters. But she had thought that it was more of an aesthetic than a protest. The details of the project were hazy in her mind. “This is Jed,” Leah said. “And this is Katie and Liam and this is Paul. Guys, this is Keisha, she—” “No. Natalie.” “Sorry, this is Natalie. We went to school together,” Leah said. “She goes here, she’s a lawyer. It’s so weird to see you guys!” When Leah proceeded to offer these people a round—“No, you sit, we’ll get”—Natalie Blake panicked, her budget being extremely tightly managed, with no space for rounds of drinks for Crusties to whom she had never before spoken in her life. But, at the bar, Leah handed over a twenty, and Natalie’s only job was to arrange six pints on a round tray best suited to five.

“Lee, how do you even know these people?”

“Newbury!”

47. AND THE SCALES FELL FROM HER EYES

It was apparently important to “keep the pressure up” if they were going to stop the government from building this byroad. Rodney listened, then pointed at the books on his desk, which had the imposing heft of the law, thousands of pages long, with brutal, functional covers. Leah tried a different tack: “It’s basically a legal issue—there’s a lot of law kids down there right now. It’s good experience, Rodney, even you would agree, even Judge Rodney of the court of the world.” Natalie Blake found herself smiling. She could at this moment think of no more wonderful thing than sitting up a tree with her good friend Leah Hanwell many hundreds of miles away from this claustrophobic room. Rodney raised his head from his tort casebook. He had a ruthless look on his face. “We don’t care about trees, Leah,” he said. “That’s your luxury. We haven’t got the time to care about trees.”

48. COUP DE FOUDRE

“Mr. De Angelis, could you carry on from ‘the power of habit’—top of the second page,” Professor Kirkwood said, and an extraordinary young man stood up in the front row. He was not a law student, but he was here, in a Philosophy of Law lecture. He was made of parts that Natalie considered mutually exclusive, and found difficult to understand together. He had a collection of unexpected freckles. His nose was very long and dramatic, in a style she did not know enough to call Roman. His hair was twisted into dreadlocks that were the opposite of Leah’s, too pristine. They framed his face neatly, ending just below his chin. He wore chinos with no socks, and those shoes that have ropes threaded along the sides, a blue blazer, and a pink shirt. An indescribable accent. Like he was born on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean and raised by Ralph Lauren.

49. MONTAIGNE

In one country, virgins openly display their private parts, while married women cover them. In another, male brothels exist. In yet another, heavy golden rods are worn through the breasts and buttocks and after dinner men wipe their hands on their testicles. In some places, they eat people. In others, the fathers decide, when the children are still in the womb, which will be kept and brought up and which killed or abandoned. Kirkwood put his hand up to halt his narrative. “Naturally,” he said, “all these people find their own habits to be unremarkable.” A few students laughed. Natalie Blake and Rodney Banks tried to find the essay between the covers of the cheap edition they shared (they tended to buy one copy of a textbook, and then, when it was finished, immediately sell it back to one of the secondhand stores by the university library). The title did not seem to be in the contents or the index. “What is the lesson here for a lawyer?” Kirkwood asked.

The notable young man’s hand went up. Even from where Natalie Blake was sitting she could see the jewelry on his brown fingers, and an elegant watch with a crocodile-skin strap that looked older than Kirkwood. He said, “Although you may turn up in court armed with reason, we live in an unreasonable world.” Natalie Blake tried to work out if this was an interesting answer. Kirkwood paused, smiled, and said, “You put a lot of faith in reason, Mr. De Angelis. I think Montaigne is more skeptical. I think his point is not that you, the lawyers, are reasonable and they, the people, are unreasonable, or even that the laws the people submit to are unreasonable, but that those who submit to traditional laws have at least the defense of ‘simplicity, obedience, and example’—can you see that, end of the third page? While those who try to change them—that is, the laws—are usually terrible in some way, monstrous. We see ourselves as perfect exceptions.” Natalie Blake was lost. Mr. De Angelis gave a slow, approving nod, the kind a man gives to his equal. His confidence seemed unwarranted, not following from anything he’d said or done. A piece of paper passed round the room. The students were asked to add their full names and from which department they hailed. Even before writing her own, Natalie Blake looked for his.

50. RECONNAISSANCE

Francesco De Angelis. Second-year economics. Universally known as Frank. Running for African and Caribbean Society president. Likely to win. Attended a “second-rate boarding school.” This from someone who attended a “grammar school.” Further: “His mum’s Italian or something. His dad was probably some African prince; that’s usually the case.”

51. EDUCATIONAL PARENTHESIS

(Some schools you “attended.” Brayton you “went” to.)

52. MARCH 8TH

It happened that Leah’s visit coincided with a dinner for International Women’s Day. A useful excuse not to see Rodney. Leah wore a green dress and Natalie wore a purple one, and they got ready together and walked to the dining hall arm in arm. The obvious pleasure they took in each other, their deep familiarity and ease in each other’s company, made them more attractive as a pair than they ever could have been alone, and, perfectly conscious of this fact, they emphasized their similarities of height and build, and kept their long legs in stride. By the time they reached their table, Natalie was quite giddy with the power of being young, almost free of a man who bored her, and soon to embark on a meal of more than two courses.

54. DESIRE

“The dean,” Natalie Blake said, and licked some chocolate off her teeth. “If she stopped speechifying, we could go to the bar.”

“No, the girl at the end of that table. In the top hat.”

“What?”

“Chinese or Japanese—there.”

“Oh, I don’t know her.”

“She’s so beautiful!”

55. THE INVENTION OF LOVE

Frank was not at the bar or anywhere else in view.

56. PARTINGS

On the bus back to the coach station, after what had been, let’s face it, a significant visit, perhaps even approaching the status of a dramatic event, Leah Hanwell said rather sheepishly, “Hope it was all right, me disappearing. Least you and Rodders got your room back,” and this was all that was said that day about Leah Hanwell’s night with Alice Nho, nor did Natalie Blake mention the fact that she had not asked Rodney to come to her room that night and never again would do so. The bus started to climb what felt like a vertical hill. Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were pressed back in their seats and against each other. “Really good to see you,” Leah said. “You’re the only person I can be all of myself with.” Which comment made Natalie begin to cry, not really at the sentiment but, rather, out of a fearful knowledge that, if reversed, the statement would be rendered practically meaningless, Ms. Blake having no self to be, not with Leah or with anyone.

57. HELPING LEAH GET HER HEAVY RUCKSACK UP THE STEPS TO THE COACH

Natalie Blake had an urge to tell her friend about the exotic brother she had seen in Kirkwood’s class. She said nothing. Quite apart from the fact that the doors to the coach were closing, she feared what, precisely, the gaping socioeconomic difference between Frank De Angelis and Rodney Banks might say to her friend Leah Hanwell about her, Natalie Blake, psychologically, as a person.

58. ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Many of the men Natalie Blake became involved with after Rodney Banks were as socioeconomically and culturally alien to her as Frank was, and far less attractive, but still she didn’t approach Frank, nor did he approach her, despite their keen awareness of each other. A poetic way of putting this would be to say, “There was an inevitability about the road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route.”

59. THE SOLE AUTHOR

More prosaically, Natalie Blake was crazy busy with self-invention. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly that she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word. She found politics and literature, music, cinema. “Found” is not the right word. She put her faith in these things. When asked by other students about Frank De Angelis—she was not the only person who had noted their fundamental compatibility—she said that he was too full of himself and vain and posh and racially confused and not her scene at all, and yet the silent and invisible bond between them strengthened, for who else but Frank De Angelis—or someone exactly like Frank De Angelis—could she ask to accompany her on the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake?

60. A SIGHTING

Five rows in front at the midnight showing of “Black Orpheus,” looking up at his doppelgänger.

61. ABANDON

Natalie Blake took out a large student loan and made a point of spending it only on frivolous things. Meals and cabs and underwear. Trying to keep up with “these people,” she soon found herself with nothing again, but now when she put a debit card in the slot and hoped that five pounds would come out she did it without the bottomless anxiety she’d once shared with Rodney Banks. She cultivated a spirit of decadence. She had, by then, glimpsed the possibility of a future, and an overdraft did not hold the same power of terror over her. The vision Marcia Blake had of such people, and had passed on to her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behavior? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: “To give them no excuse.”

62. A SIGHTING

Dressed as Frantz Fanon on a staircase at a party. His costume consisted of a name tag and a white coat borrowed off a medical student. His date came as Sappho.

63. A THEORY ABOUT THE TRACKING OF MICHELLE HOLLAND

It is perhaps the profound way in which capitalism enters women’s minds and bodies that renders “ruthless comparison” the basic mode of their relationships with others. Certainly Natalie Blake tracked the progress of Michelle Holland with a closer attention than she did her own life—without ever speaking to her. Besides Rodney, Michelle was the only other person from Brayton at the university. A math prodigy. She did not have the luxury of mediocrity. Raised in the brutal high-rise towers of South Kilburn, which had nothing to recommend them, no genteel church culture, none of the pretty green areas of Caldwell or (Natalie presumed) the intimate neighbors. What could she be but exceptional? Father in jail, mother sectioned. She lived with her grandmother. She was sensitive and sincere, awkward, defensive, lonely. It was Natalie’s belief that she, Natalie Blake, didn’t have to say a word to Michelle Holland to know all of this—that she could look at the way Michelle walked and know it. I am the sole author. Consequently, Natalie was not at all surprised to hear of Michelle’s decline and fall, halfway through their final year. No drink or drugs or bad behavior. She just stopped. (This was Natalie’s interpretation.) Stopped going to lectures, studying, eating. She had been asked to pass the entirety of herself through a hole that would accept only part. (Natalie’s conclusion.)

64. THE END OF HISTORY

When Natalie now thought of adult life (she hardly ever thought of it), she envisioned a long corridor, off which opened many rooms—each with a friend in it—a communal kitchen, a single gigantic bed in which all would sleep and screw, a world governed by the principles of friendship. For how can you oppress a friend? How can you cheat on a friend? How can you ask a friend to suffer while you thrive? In this simple way—without marches and slogans, without politics, without any of the mess you get by ripping paving stones out of the ground—the revolution had arrived. Late to the party, Natalie Blake now enthusiastically took her good friend Leah Hanwell’s advice and started hugging strangers on dance floors. She looked at the little white pill in her palm. What could go wrong, now we were all friends? Remember to carry a bottle of water. Anyway, it was all already decided. Don’t chew. Swallow. Strobe lights flash. The beat goes on. (I will be a lawyer and you will be a doctor and he will be a teacher and she will be a banker and we will be artists and they will be soldiers, and I will be the first black woman and you will be the first Arab and she will be the first Chinese and everyone will be friends, everyone will understand each other.) Friends are friendly to each other, friends help each other out. No one need be exceptional. Friends know the difference between solicitors and barristers, and the best place to apply, and the likelihood of being accepted, and the names of the relevant scholarships and bursaries. “You choose your friends; you don’t choose your family.” How many times had Natalie Blake heard that line?

65. THE UNCONSOLED (LEAH’S THIRD VISIT)

“Oh, Jesus, I just saw Rodney in Sainsbury’s!” Leah said, distraught, dropping two shopping bags on the table. “I looked in his basket. He had a meat pie and two cans of ginger beer and a bottle of that hot sauce you put on everything. I came up behind him in the queue, and he pretended he’d forgotten something and hurried off. But then I saw him a few minutes later at a far end queue, and he had exactly the same four items.”

66. MILK ROUND

A festive, chaotic scene, as well attended as the Fresher’s Fair, although this time the banners were not homemade, and instead of Tolkien societies and choral clubs they had printed upon them the melodic names of law firms and the familiar names of banks. Girls in cheerleader outfits bearing the logo of a management-consulting firm went around the room giving out little pots of ice cream and cans of energy drink. Natalie Blake twisted the can in her hand to read the tag that ran around it: Claim Your Future. She dug into the ice cream with a little blond wood panel, and watched the green balloons of a German bank slip from their tethers and float slowly up to the ceiling. She heard Rodney’s voice coming from somewhere. He was three tables along, sitting with monstrous keenness on the very edge of a plastic chair. Opposite him, an amused man in a suit and tie made notes on a clipboard.

67. MIXED METAPHORS

A year and a half later, when everyone had returned or else moved to London and Natalie was studying for the bar, Rodney Banks sent a letter c/o Marcia Blake that began, “Keisha, you talk about following your heart, but weird how your heart always seems to know which side its bread is buttered.” Frank De Angelis took this letter from Natalie Blake and kissed the side of her head. “Poor old Rodney. He’s not still trying to become a lawyer, is he?” ♦

Zadie Smith has contributed numerous short stories, nonfiction pieces, and a personal history—“Dead Man Laughing,” about her father’s love of comedy—since first appearing in The New Yorker in 1999.